An Easy Way to Publish Media Kits
Sales teams are always looking for ways to publish media kits, sales sheets, and other marketing collateral. It’s often a challenge getting the documents on your web site and even then, they are usually PDF documents that take a long time to download before someone can read it. There’s also the bandwidth required to host and deliver large PDF documents.
I’ve discovered an elegant solution to the problem: Scribd’s iPaper. It’s quick and easy solution that is 100% free. I downloaded the Aviation Week media kit in PDF format (it’s freely available on their web site) and put it into the iPaper format. You can see the iPaper version by clicking this link.
What I like about this is:
- It loads very quickly into the browser window (much faster than PDF)
- It looks great
- It can be downloaded as a PDF or printed
- It can be kept private (e.g. only people you give the URL to) or made public
- It has tracking as to how many views
- Did I mention it’s 100% free and easy to use?
A quick, simple, and free solution to a common problem. To do this yourself, go to www.scribd.com, create a new account, and upload the PDF version of your media kit. Then just pass along the URL of the fullscreen version to your sales team and customers. You can even link to it directly from your web site.
OK, so this isn’t an emedia strategy that’s going to rock the media world, but sometimes it’s the little things that make life a lot easier and more enjoyable. Enjoy!
3 Responses to “ “An Easy Way to Publish Media Kits”
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First of all: Nice blog you are running here, Eric. It’s already added to the blogroll of my newborn blog.
I totally agree with you that PDF is slow and challenging when presenting publications online. But to me the Scribd solution is not much of a difference, when it comes to usability and preserving the look-and-feel from a physical issue.
At Zmags we came up with another alternative to PDF. It exceeds the capabilities of Ipaper and is much more user-friendly (in all respect).
From an online strategist point of view this area is worth digging into. Depending on the business and publication type these online issues can be used strategically to bring down production and ditribution costs by lowering the circulation of the printed version. Or online issues can serve as another source of revenue for magazine publishers, who can offer linked interactive ads in their online magazines.
Using Scribd is just scribing the surface of the benefits with e-publishing.
I hope to read some more about this rapidly growing business area here.
Thanks for the plug on Aviation Week!
I don’t think I have ever talked with a marketing manager that enjoyed working on media kits or sales sheets for that matter- and many publishers have too many of those.
Definitely a neat service.
Zmags, Texterity, NXTbook, Olive, even Zinio … they’re all good digital magazine based systems. But honestly, I think they’re overkill for media kits and sales sheets. Why pay for that when iPaper is free? Now, if you want to add video to your media kit or if you want some snazzy DRM to collect registration for a media kit, then yes, it pays to look at a more robust system. But for nearly every publisher I’ve worked with over the past 10 years, a solution like iPaper works just fine.